Continuing my reading of Forecast, there is a chapter on how climate change will increase immigration and ergo, anti-immigration rhetoric.
This is particularly timely after the sudden prominence of immigration into the health care debate. Obama said government funds would not go to illegal immigrants, Rep. Wilson said he lied. Now, both are somewhat right. The way it was intended, illegal immigrants would not qualify for subsidies, though they could still purchase insurance (in theory, I still don’t know why they would want that kind of exposure to being caught and that immigration policy, not health care policy is the main reason they are uninsured). However, as with programs like CHIP, some would probably find their ways into the program due to the lack of rigorous checks. The reason to avoid rigorous checks is they tend to impose burdens on those who ARE eligible. So in the course of preventing one illegal immigrant from gaining benefit, you might discourage ten eligible individuals from getting the benefit. That is probably not an acceptable cost to be sure that no illegal immigrants are getting assistance.
But we are not sane when it comes to illegal immigrants. To borrow a quote from my friend, “even when the Republicans lose, they win.” This is seen in this case by the Obama Administration going beyond documentation checks for subsidies, but even for enrollment in the health exchange. That is to say, we will not allow illegal immigrants to buy health insurance in this country. We would prefer they wait to get sick and then be treated in our ERs (where we will still treat them, because obviously we aren’t the horrible kind of people who would just sit back and watch an illegal immigrant die). There is a lot of bad involved (for our sake, not just theirs) in not getting illegal immigrants health coverage, but like I said, I’m not really worried about the impact of this policy on illegal immigrants, I am worried about the impact on those who are eligible for the exchange/subsidies who will be less likely to get enrolled due to these barriers. But I guess this is just the price you have to pay to take a step forward.
Of course, the real way to deal with this is immigration reform, so that all immigrants can have some form of legal status. This is where I will tie things back to Forecast. There is the clearly beneficial immigration, where the labor demand in various industries exceeds the native supply. This benefits everyone. However, much immigration is not the result of demand here but the situation in the home country. One thing that seems clear is that building a wall and trying to deport everybody is not a winning strategy. the best way is to reduce the reasons for immigrating.
Climate change can devastate countries and through strife or lost economic opportunities, force people to move. Thus a policy to fight climate change is actually a policy to lower immigration.
Our current food policies subsidize our farmers and keep food prices artificially low, preventing farmers in developing countries from being competitive on the world market. Instead of earning a living on a farm in Mexico, a Mexican ends up working for a pittance as a migrant worker in America. Thus abandoning food subsidies would work as a policy to lower immigration (and it would also help lower health care costs since subsidies benefit junk food more than healthy food).
When multinational corporations “outsource” production to developing countries, those countries derive great economic benefit and opportunity. Someone working in a factory in China is not someone working in a sweatshop in LA or NYC. Thus favoring free trade and opposing nationalistic “made in the USA” sloganeering is a policy to lower immigration.
These are just a few of the policies that aren’t immigration policies per se but would have a much greater impact on immigration than immigration policy itself. We need to look at the root causes of immigration rather than respond reflexively to the immigration that does happy.
That said, I can’t help but imagine that we will need to get to a sort of sci-fi socialist world where we don’t have to produce to have reasonable quality of life. Robots will occupy more and more work (until they turn on us and enslave us) leaving little for us to do outside of intellectual and artistic pursuits. We might just become those fat slobs in Wall-E. But it will be essential to have at least some manner of thorough redistribution so that the benefits of this robotic ease is distributed to all.
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